OICR researchers have contributed to major open source projects available to the global research community in order to accelerate cancer research. Click the link below to read about more of OICR’s open source software projects.

In the effort to bring better disease prevention and treatment to patients faster, cancer researchers are thinking more creatively about ways to conduct high-quality scientific research. Concerns about the quality, efficiency and reproducibility of research have motivated the open science movement – the growing trend of making data, methods, software and research more accessible to the greater scientific community.

Open source software (OSS), a major component of open science, enables research groups to reduce redundant efforts in software engineering by sharing software code and methods. In addition to improving efficiency, OSS promotes high-quality research by enabling collaboration, and helps make research easier to reproduce by making it more transparent.

Open source tools like Wikipedia and Google Maps help us get things done faster in our daily lives. In the same way, researchers rely on a variety of open source tools to help them make discoveries faster. Reactome (www.reactome.org) is one such tool. Researchers use it because it relates human genes, proteins and other biomolecules to the biological pathways and processes in which they participate, helping to facilitate new cancer research breakthroughs. Earlier this month Reactome reached a major milestone when it released its 10,000th annotated human protein to the research community. We spoke to OICR’s Dr. Robin Haw, who is Project Manager and Outreach Coordinator at Reactome, about the history of the project, the importance of this particular milestone and where the project is headed next.

The data are being shared with the wider biological research community to help in the development of new therapies for diseases like cancer.

Toronto (October 6, 2016) – The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the New York University School of Medicine and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) today announced a major milestone in the Reactome project: the annotation and release of its 10,000th human protein, making it the most comprehensive open access pathway knowledgebase available to the scientific community.